The number and variety of wireless terminal devices, such as mobile telephones, personal computers and PDAs with wireless communication capabilities, self-service kiosks and two-way pagers is rapidly increasing. Software applications which run on these devices increase their utility. For example, a mobile phone may include an application which retrieves the weather for a range of cities, or a PDA may include an application that allows a user to shop for groceries. These software applications take advantage of the connectivity to a network in order to provide timely and useful services to users.
As is well known in the art, wireless terminal devices commonly have limited memory resources, with the result that ongoing handling of low-memory conditions is required. Wireless applications developers try to address these issues various known means, such as by utilizing software design techniques that require less memory, optimizing internal data structures, limiting the amount of data that users can exploit using the application, and/or by removing (deleting) redundant data or code. Since applications are designed to operate independently of one another, the implementation of these approaches is normally unique to each application, which means that every application installed on a terminal device will have its own memory management code. This “duplication” of memory management software consumes additional memory, and so further reduces available memory resources. A further limitation of this arrangement is that it requires the software developer(s) to have experience in memory optimization techniques and be explicitly aware of the memory restrictions of every device type. This creates a barrier to the development of new wireless applications.
Accordingly, improved methods and systems for managing low-memory conditions in wireless terminal devices remains highly desirable.